


One Little Ewe Lamb

by yuletide_archivist



Category: Christian Bible (Old Testament), תנ"ך | Tanakh
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-12-25
Updated: 2007-12-25
Packaged: 2018-01-25 05:39:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 633
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1634453
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yuletide_archivist/pseuds/yuletide_archivist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Batsheva was no devil, just a woman.</p>
            </blockquote>





	One Little Ewe Lamb

**Author's Note:**

> A treat, obviously, written because I found the prompt so tantalizing. I wish I had had more time to flesh it out -- perhaps this year! 
> 
> Written for RubyNye

 

 

Batsheva's life was a closed fist: just the promise of something better (a handful of grain, a fleck of gold nestled in a palm, a kiss grabbed from midair and clutched tight), opened to reveal something sickening and awful. Flowers blossoming into violence that blackens her eyes darker than kohl ever could.

First Uriah, who would rather sleep on the palace floor, drunk and naked with his brothers, than come home to her. She remembers his dark hair, the line of it that traced its way down his back. She remembers that he never gave her a child, that he did not touch her the way she had expected to be touched. She remembers that he had left her for that far-away war and that he had never expected to return to her.

She was just a little girl when she was given to him. She had expected to be the ark of his covenant, but she had become nothing but a distant sound on a breeze, the cry of a bird, the clinking of a long chain, tying him to a place he wanted so badly to leave.

Second David, who released Uriah from her bondage. Who spied through Batsheva's windows as she washed her long hair, who sent huge palace guards to guide her to the king's chambers, who pulled her hair and squealed like a lamb when he spilt inside her.

Who had given her a child not of soft flesh and soft hair, but of stone. The stone in her stomach growing, pulling down through her pelvis until she was crawling on the floor, crying like the baby she would never raise. 

She stayed locked in her room. She hid from a husband who would kill her if he were to return and find her like this (though he never would return). She hid from a King who had decided to conquer her kingdom and plant his bloody banner.

Uriah died. His murderer took Batsheva into his bed and had her even as she bled, even as she cried out to a God that never answered women's prayers. 

A child who died, a child of stone who did not cry. A child that waited for death and peered at her with the black eyes of a demon. The child who had eaten her alive, from the inside out, and who died without even smiling.

David had come to her, had not noticed her tears but had admired the plumpness of her stomach and legs. Who had not asked a single question of her, but who had pushed her face into a sweat-soaked pillow and taught her that perhaps there was no God for women at all.

Batsheva became David's queen, became the mother of his son, of his successor. Her son, Shlomo, with the fair skin and tender eyes, he would one day rise to the throne and she would be thrown scraps and accept them gratefully. She would sit at Shlomo's right so he would keep watch on her and he would hold her hand and she would wait silently for death to come to her.

She wonders, sometimes, sitting on that throne, if one day, someone will look back on her and paint her as a seductress, the one who pulled David from his piety, who used David's lust to kill Uriah, who worked for Satan himself. 

And then she wonders if there will one day, maybe, be a woman who will bow to her husband, her son, her lover, and will understand that life is more complicated than Good and Evil, God and Satan, David and Batsheva. Who will be brave enough to do what Batsheva herself cannot.

Who will stand up and say, "No more, enough. Enough," and wait unsmiling for the blade to fall.

 


End file.
